This film is ostensibly about Maya Gabeira, a Brazilian competitive big-wave surfer (ie towed on special boards into waves of 20ft and over), and her struggle to compete again after a devastating injury in 2013. And yes, it certainly is about her, but it’s almost as if everyone involved – Gabeira, people who were supposedly her closest associates, and even the director Stephanie Johnes – aren’t quite conscious of the fact that they’re also making a documentary about endemic sexism in sport. You can almost see awareness of that latter theme coming to mind in the last half of the film, when Maya goes to battle with the organisation that’s meant to champion athletes in her field but which seemingly closes ranks against her lest her achievement makes that of her male peers seem less impressive. To explain further risks spoiling the film, which transcends its by-numbers sports doc set-up and evolves into something more thoughtful.
In fact, it’s kind of a disappointment that Johnes, whose previous credits include several other sports docs as well as work with muckraking film-maker Alex Gibney, doesn’t lean harder into a feminist perspective. Maybe that’s not something Gabeira actually wanted; she is a woman who comes across as easygoing, forgiving and, in the early runnings, seemingly happy to be made famous not just for her surfing prowess but also for the good looks that made her such a promotable figure in the sport. Even former sporting partner Carlos Burle, a surfer himself who operated the jet ski that towed Gabeira to the waves in the early part of her career, is seen here praising how she had “nice tits” and a “nice ass”, as a montage of surf magazine covers fly by, all featuring Gabeira in a bikini.
Needless to say, one does not wear a bikini while surfing big waves. When Gabeira had a wipeout in Nazaré, Portugal in 2013 – all of it caught on camera and shown here, albeit featuring a tiny figure seen from a great distance – Burle was the one who towed her to shore. The film just skirts suggesting that his actions may have contributed to her nearly drowning. But he certainly doesn’t cover himself in glory when he says after the medics took her away to hospital, he got back in the water and continued surfing because the waves were so great that day. Indeed, like water rushing in to plug a gap, the whole industry seemed to mindlessly fill the void after her injury took her out of competing for a while.
However, the story does have a happy ending, one partly facilitated by the actions of little girls in princess outfits accompanied by adorable pets who used the power of internet crowd-sourcing to shift sentiment, with an online petition to get the big wave people to submit Gabeira to Guinness World Records. Those cute videos are almost worth the price of admission alone if you’re not already coming for the spectacular cinematography of tubular swells and 60ft-high walls of water. But all that is why we love sports movies in the first place, surely.
• Maya and the Wave is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 October.
